W. H. Auden quotes - page 6

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain. (W. H. Auden)
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
W. H. Auden
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
W. H. Auden
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. Auden
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. Auden
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
W. H. Auden
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
W. H. Auden
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say. (W. H. Auden)
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
W. H. Auden
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
W. H. Auden
Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. Auden
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
W. H. Auden
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
W. H. Auden
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
W. H. Auden
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
W. H. Auden
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
W. H. Auden
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. (W. H. Auden)
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
W. H. Auden
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
W. H. Auden
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
W. H. Auden
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
W. H. Auden